We metin the lovely but slighty echoey environs of the Tiled Hall Café to discuss My Sister, My Love by Joyce Carol Oates – a story which the Guardian has described as ‘ a lavish, cynical portrait of family dysfunction’. Inspired by the real life murder of American pre teen beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey it is the story of Bliss Rampike upcoming ice skating superstar and her murder. The depressing tale is told by her surviving brother Skyler.

The book was my suggestion as I first read it a few years ago and I’ll nail my colours to the mast now – I adore Joyce Carol Oates- she is one of the few authors to make me cry and I findher surgically precise evocative writinga joy to read – even when she is writing about sad and disturbing topics.

Re-reading it for Book Club just further confirmed my love of her writing and thankfully I wasn’t alone in my appreciation of her skill though the difficulty of the subject matter was also discussed. We also agreed about our feeling of distaste towards beauty pageants for very young children and the potentially damaging consequences of such competitions. The consensus of the group about the book was that it was‘grim, challenging but rewarding’.

We also discussed making a few changes to the way we run – we’re now going to meet every 6 weeks instead of once a month as that will give us a bit more time between meetings for reading and all the suggestions for books to read are going to be put on pieces of paper and put into a hat and we’ll take it in turns to pick a suggestion from the hat

We are a very friendly book club- we don’t mind if you haven’t finished the book, only seen a film version of it or just read a Wikipedia entry about it – come along and share your opinions - next meeting will be on Sunday 21st July 2pm when we will be discussing The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald – venue to be confirmed but likely to be Tiled Hall Cafe - but suggestions for new venues welcome.